It must be allowed that by the time they got to the station there was nothing of the early-morning Mrs. Emsworth left about her. On the platform Bilton approached her with rather an anxious face. 'I particularly want to speak to you, Dorothy,' he said in a low voice. 'You can help me.' She looked at him with extremely vivid virulence. 'Oh, go away, you beast!' she said. 'I can help you, you say. No doubt I can. But I won't. Go away!' Bilton had the sense to see that he needed help, for there had been a very awkward moment when he went into Mrs. Emsworth's room the night before. He himself was very good at acting quickly in any emergency he had foreseen, but this one was utterly unforeseen, and had found him helplessly unprepared. Had he had even a moment's preparation, he felt sure that he could have said something which would anyhow have been palliative; but since the thing was done, he did not trouble his head about what the palliative would have been. For he had come in--his knock unheard--and found the two ladies together. Upon which Dorothy laughed, Mrs. Massington turned pink, and he retreated. There was the situation. And the most unpromising feature of it was that Dorothy had laughed. With all his quickness he could see no way out. It was clearly impossible for him to open the subject again to Mrs. Massington; it was equally obvious that she would put a construction on his presence. The only person who could conceivably help him was Dorothy, and now she had called him a beast. But, apparently, during the journey to New York she relented, for as they boarded the mangy-looking ferry-boat that conveyed them across the river, she threw a word to him over her shoulder. 'I shall be in at lunch,' she said. 'You can come if you like.' He did not like that either, though it was better than nothing, for he felt that she had in a sense the whip-hand of him, and knew it. And Bilton was not accustomed to let anybody have the whip-hand of him.